THE BEST AND THE ANGRIEST

By SARA M. EVANS; Sara M. Evans is the author of ''Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America.''

Published: June 17, 1990

AN AMERICAN ORDEAL

The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era.

By Charles DeBenedetti.

Charles Chatfield, assisting author.

Illustrated. 495 pp. Syracuse:

Syracuse University Press.

Cloth, $49.50. Paper, $16.95.

The antiwar movement of the Vietnam era was a sprawling, amorphous, seemingly chaotic mass phenomenon. That the movement was able to mobilize sustained public dissent for nearly a decade represents a major achievement. In the process it shaped a generation that was already destined, by its sheer size and the nature of its historical moment, to leave a deep mark on American culture.

The exhaustive research and 1,100-page original draft of a history of the antiwar movement, ''An American Ordeal,'' was done by Charles DeBenedetti, a professor of history at the University of Toledo. Upon his death in 1987, Charles Chatfield, a professor of history at Wittenberg University, undertook to rewrite, shorten by half and complete the book. The result is far too mired in detail and occasionally repetitious. Yet the detail itself gains a kind of power as the reader begins to share the movement's frustration at the seeming endlessness of the war and at its own internal factiousness. The strength of ''An American Ordeal'' lies in its detailed chronicle of the interaction between the antiwar movement and the United States Government.

In the midst of multiplying organizations, personality conflicts, turf fights and deep schisms over tactics, there were always two distinct strategic and ideological tendencies, one liberal and one radical. One of the values of ''An American Ordeal'' is its painstaking charting of the pre-Vietnam existence and the revival after 1969 of a liberal peace movement focused on working through existing political channels and electoral politics.

Before the Vietnam War galvanized American politics, signs of a new peace movement had already emerged around issues like the test-ban treaty, disarmament and disengagement from the cold war. Its liberal and radical wings differed fundamentally in their definitions of broad strategic issues and goals, but they shared a moral language, one that shaped the discourse of the antiwar movement. The cold-war threat of nuclear holocaust, combined with the hypermoral rhetoric in which tensions between the United States and Russia were cast as a cosmic battle of good versus evil, democracy versus tyranny, set the stage for a protracted conflict not only over specific policies but, more important, over the most deeply held American values.

The authors document the dilemma of liberals during the Administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, who perceived dissent on the war as a threat to social and civil rights legislation. Forced to swallow guns with their butter, the antiwar liberals would not open up the political process for a full-scale debate as the war escalated. As a result, protest was forced outside of political channels - not because radicals disdained them but because the channels themselves were blocked. The moral claims of a liberal Government contrasted with the growing devastation of war only heightened protesters' outrage and alienation.

The moralistic quality of the movement's language further intensified as Richard Nixon began to withdraw American troops and ''Vietnamize'' the war. In this period a small minority's penchant for symbolic violent acts increased the hostility of a public that was itself deeply disenchanted with the war. This enormous gap between the public's discomfort with the war and its antipathy for the movement itself remained ''the abiding irony of the antiwar opposition.''

This irony, however, points to some of the cultural meanings and impact of the antiwar movement that ''An American Ordeal'' is much less successful in exploring. The antiwar movement brought about a profound cultural transformation characterized by the deep estrangement of American youth and expressed in the diverse arenas of black nationalism, women's liberation and counterculture ferment. The authors, clearly sympathetic to the liberal wing's pragmatic use of traditional political channels, find the confluence of the antiwar movement with civil rights and student movements irksome. This ad hoc coalition muddied protests by blending opposition to this specific war (or to aspects such as troop escalation or bombing) with domestic critiques about the failures of American society toward blacks, women, students and the poor. It also meant that leadership of the antiwar movement tended to be highly fluid. Organizations frequently shifted their focus of activity and new organizations continually emerged at the grass roots. By 1970 the antiwar movement had grown to more than 1,200 associations from a few dozen in 1960.

As long-term peace activists and pacifists drew on the energies of an emerging generation, they also absorbed that generation's struggle to redefine manhood and womanhood. But the deepening gender crisis is completely omitted from ''An American Ordeal.'' The problem here is not simply that the leadership focus of the book leads to an overrepresentation of male leaders (both in the text and in the accompanying photos). The protest movement itself was an extraordinarily gendered phenomenon.

Several women's groups continued a long peace movement tradition of criticizing war from the nurturant perspective of motherhood. But ''An American Ordeal'' offers little sense of the internal dynamics of these groups, most notably Women's Strike for Peace and Another Mother for Peace, despite detailed descriptions of leadership battles within SANE, Americans for Democratic Action and the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Women's groups had a longstanding critique of militarism as a distorted expression of male aggressiveness. This received a new twist in the 60's as young men used the antiwar movement itself as a vehicle for anxieties about gender and cultural definitions of manhood. The symbolic act of draft card burning signaled a rejection of a traditional rite of passage into manhood and opened resisters to charges of cowardice. These anxieties, combined with the continuing frustration of a diffuse movement that could never be sure it was having an impact, at least partly explains the symbolic extremities, apocalyptic expectations and violent fantasies of many militants. The resulting hyper-machismo of the later New Left, in turn, heightened the alienation of younger women who, critical of any approach emphasizing women's roles as mothers and wives, spun off into a separate women's liberation movement. ''An American Ordeal'' virtually ignores this dimension of the peace movement.

It is difficult to know how the 60's would have ended without the war. The antiwar movement extended what we think of as the 60's well into the 70's. In ''An American Ordeal'' we sense the strangeness of a successful movement that continually felt like failure, a movement that forced an end to a disastrous war over the course of a decade and ended up defining a generation.